Image description: The photo shows a smiling girl with her hair loose and sunglasses over her head. The background shows the Pyrenees framed by green deciduous trees in summer. The photo was taken during a hike in the Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park in Aragon in Spain.
Emilia Galli
Spain
December 16, 2025
Terrestrial biomes in paleoecology: insights from Heinrich Walter’s classification
Biomes capture the broad ecological structure of the Earth, providing a powerful ecological framework that links climate, vegetation, and biodiversity, making them essential for interpreting past environments where detailed data are scarce. Their use is especially valuable in paleoecology, allowing robust, climate-based reconstructions of ancient landscapes. This enables the study of biomes’ geographic evolution, historical fragmentation, and their impact on faunal evolution. Heinrich Walter’s classification stands out for its integrative approach combining climatic and biological thresholds to define terrestrial biomes. We developed WaltR, an open-access R function that formalizes Heinrich Walter’s biome classification. This function utilizes explicit temperature and precipitation thresholds to identify the ten major terrestrial biomes, providing the first explicit quantification of this classification and strengthening the connection between climate datasets and ecological interpretation across timescales.
Image coming soon!
TBD
Alessandro Carniti
China
January 13, 2026
TBD
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Pal(a)eoPERCS 